Barun Roy: Building smart communities

With 485 projects worldwide, the focus is shifting to smart cities where activities would revolve around expanding energy efficiency

In another month or so, up in the high deserts of New Mexico's Los Alamos County in the US, Japan's first overseas and US' first international demonstration project to create an energy-efficient smart community will come to an official end. But it'll continue to function beyond its role as a model and have vast implications as a real-time guide to the future for a rapidly populating and an increasingly energy-hungry world.

Smart communities have come into particular focus in the last five years as the need is urgently felt that the contribution of renewable energy to the total energy mix must expand if economies have to grow, and the world has to sustain a likely population of 9.2 billion by 2050 (rising from seven billion in 2011), most of whom will be living in urban areas. And that contribution can't increase in a significant way unless we build an adequate infrastructure of smart supply grids, backed by dependable means of storing renewable, especially solar, supplies to take care of off-production interruptions, and test their efficacy in real-time, real-life situations.

Back in 2009, when the Los Alamos Department of Public Utilities was planning to build an innovative, low-flow hydroelectric power plant at Abiquiu Lake, Japan's New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) offered a joint project where it could demonstrate smart technologies developed by big Japanese companies, which are difficult to test in Japan. The Los Alamos firm, which already produces over 30 per cent of its electricity from renewable sources, readily agreed and later signed up for a similar demonstration project with NEDO in Albuquerque.

At Los Alamos, NEDO's idea was two-fold: to test large-scale solar energy battery storage systems and to build a smart home to test appliances and systems that work with the electrical grid to optimise energy use and efficiency. A micro energy management system was to be developed to run the smart home, tied to a neighbourhood of 1,600 customers provided with smart metres.

Utilising a one Mw solar array and large-scale lead acid and sodium sulphur batteries, the project has achieved 25 to 50 per cent photovoltaic penetration levels in the test area. The micro energy management system has forecasting and scheduling capabilities that help balance loads and absorb output fluctuations. The smart house that the grid serves has three bedrooms and three bathrooms, and is equipped with a 3.4 kW photovoltaic system, a 24 kWh battery, an inverter, a smart metre, smart electrical appliances, web cams, communication equipment, and sensors.

A home energy management system communicates within the house and with the grid. It allows electrical demand to be responsive to signals from the smart grid, predicts and controls power consumption, and "islands" the house during power outages. No one actually lives in the house, but the project simulates the energy consumption for a family of four, heating water, powering TVs, lights, and other appliances on and off throughout the day and night.

Since signing up for the Los Alamos project, NEDO has teamed up with several other countries, one of the latest being Indonesia, for similar international projects, brightening renewable energy prospects and leading the world assuredly towards smarter living. In June 2011, it launched a project in China, at Gongqingcheng in Jiangxi province, where the economy is expected to grow significantly in the next few years, drawing in new population and sending the demand for power soaring. Seven big Japanese companies, including Toshiba, ITOCHU, and NTT Docomo, are collaborating with NEDO on this and other smart community experiments, many of which have come up in Japan itself.

At the moment, there are 485 smart community projects going on in the world, of which 266 are in advanced nations and 219 in developing nations. Most of these are smart grid testing and existing community redevelopment projects. Only 73 are projects to build new smart communities from scratch, of which 52 are in China. In the few projects that NEDO is involved in worldwide, the focus is increasingly shifting to building integrated smart communities where most activities would revolve around expanding the energy mix and optimising energy efficiency. At Gongqingcheng, factories, public buildings, schools, hospitals, and private residential houses are involved in smart community management systems, as well as public transportation based on electric vehicles. The aim is to develop an advanced model that can be scaled up for small and medium cities.

But energy efficiency is only part, though a very critical part, of what makes a city smart. The other essential elements of a smart city, which all cities in future must seek to be, are mobility (based on extensive networks of rapid public transport), liveability (clean and green neighbourhoods in non-polluting environments, and accessibility (with a firm control on urban sprawl allowing easy connectivity to various facilities and services). That's where the safety of our urban future lies.

rbarun@gmail.com